From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004

by Herbert P. Bix

Mr. Bix is the author of HIROHITO AND THE MAKING OF MODERN JAPAN which received the Pulitzer Prize.

The roots of the Japan-China
War (1937-45) can be traced back to the surprise attack
that Japanese army officers launched, in September 1931,
on Chinese forces in Manchuria. Their premeditated coup
led to Japan's seizure of the vast, resource-rich region.
Initially carried out in the name of self-defense, the Manchurian
takeover was later justified as a step toward establishing
a new status quo in Asia. A long series of clashes alternating
with truces followed between Japanese forces and Chinese
un-reconciled to Japanese rule.

Starting with the battle of Shanghai, a port city at the
mouth of the Yangzi River in early autumn 1937, the war
began in earnest. During fighting near the foreign concessions,
Japanese forces started killing Chinese prisoners of war
on the spot. Three-months later, after they had completely
encircled and isolated Nanjing, Chinese resistance crumbled
and the capital of Nationalist China fell. Frustrated and
exhausted Japanese army units, their discipline frayed by
fierce fighting, went on a rampage. The news of killing,
pillage, arson, and rape was widely reported and spread
quickly throughout the world. Chinese anger increased; nationalist
resistance hardened and a "fight Japan" attitude
spread.

Japan's decision to take Nanjing and the ensuing bloodbath
marked strategic and symbolic turning points in a war of
conquest for which no solution short of withdrawal would
ever be in sight. But Nanjing might not have become a symbol
of massacre in the West had the interests of the Great Powers
not been served by remembering it. For the Japanese sinking
of the U.S. gunboat "Panay" and the British gunboats
"Lady Bird" and "Bee," occurred in the
midst of the attack on Nanjing. News of these incidents
overlapped with reporting on the massacre and highlighted
the seriousness of the challenge that Japan was mounting
to Anglo-American imperialism in China.

By late 1938 the Japanese imperial armed forces had
bogged down. They had been constantly treating the Chinese
as a conquered people, underestimating the hatred that their
brutal behavior had engendered. Now, they could neither
win the war nor, for domestic political reasons, acknowledge
having lost it. They could only go on winning battles, occupying
coastal cities and their hinterlands, and setting up puppet
governments with Japanese officers in the background, running
the show. Hoping to break the stalemate, Tokyo spread the
fighting to Southeast Asia, then escalated again by attacking
Pearl Harbor. The road to diplomatic failure and calamity
that Japan's leaders had embarked on in 1931 ended, fourteen
years later in August 1945, with the unconditional surrender
of a nation in ruins from American bombing.

Imperial Japan was hardly alone in killing the innocent.
The second half of the twentieth century, which really began
in 1945, witnessed massive attacks on civilian populations
and scores of atrocities from which Americans too easily
averted their eyes because their own government or its client
regimes was doing most of the killing. To pose comparative
questions about war crimes in different situations, times,
and places is a simple but useful strategy for illustrating
this nationalist bias. The U.S. war in Vietnam, Israel's
thirty-seven-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,
and the U.S. occupation-war in Iraq are three events that,
when brought together with Japan's China War, illustrate
the usefulness of the comparative approach. They also serve
to make explicit how war crimes are used to justify as well
as criticize the international behavior of states.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the United States was fighting
in Vietnam. It was the heyday first of President Kennedy,
who started the war, and Johnson and Nixon who escalated
the killing to genocidal levels because they too were unwilling
to acknowledge defeat in an ideological crusade against
global communism. Leading voices of sanity, Noam Chomsky
and Howard Zinn most notably, grappled with historical analogies
to 1930s Japan. It should have been only a matter of common
sense for American elites to have recognized the parallels
between the imperialisms of Japan and the United States,
and to have grasped that the weaknesses of the American
position in Vietnam would eventually result in defeat. Unfortunately,
few had the courage or vision to recognize the power of
the analogy. As the case of former Sec. of Defense Robert
S. McNamara illustrates, no senior American decision-maker
ever acknowledged that the concept of "crime"
was applicable to what the U.S did in Indochina.

After the cold war I revisited the 1930s in order to study
the varied roles that the Showa Emperor Hirohito had played
in mobilizing the energies of the Japanese people for war,
and in making an immoral war seem moral. Later I drew parallels
between Japanese atrocities in China and American atrocities
in Vietnam.{1} One general similarity was that between the
mainstream, postwar Japanese response to the Nanjing massacre,
and the debate over American involvement in Vietnam, which
came to a climax at the time of the My Lai or Son My village
atrocity, in which American soldiers murdered nearly five
hundred unarmed, non-combatant civilians.

Japan's postwar leaders were forced to draw lessons from
the lost war. The Japanese people, exposed for the first
time to eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence presented
at the Tokyo international war crimes trial, learned the
truth about some of the atrocities and war crimes that their
soldiers had committed. Other crimes, such as the sexual
slavery of "comfort women," would remain hidden
for decades. But after the American occupation of their
country had ended, and throughout most of the cold war,
official denial of mass atrocities and the repetition of
lies rather than the clarification of facts dominated Japanese
government responses to the Nanjing massacre. This suggests
that the deep wounds inflicted by war on the Japanese people
penetrated their conservative political class the least.

In the United States after the Vietnam War something similar
happened. Political and military leaders, as well as young,
ambitious future-politicians like Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, who served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations,
and bureaucrats like Paul Wolfowitz who started his government
service under Ford, failed to learn any "lessons"
from the U.S. war beyond the need to avoid another "quagmire."
The only flaws in the war that they ever perceived were
strategic and tactical ones, and those pertaining to media
access to the battlefield. No international war crimes tribunal
stood in judgment on American war crimes, nor did the American
polity (unlike Japan's) undergo any radical restructuring.
The anti-war movement, effective in mounting critiques and
helping to end the war, was unable to sustain pressure for
domestic institutional reforms that would lead to fundamental
changes in U.S. foreign policy.

Neither the House nor the Senate held Presidents Johnson
and Nixon legally accountable for lying repeatedly to the
American people about the origins and reasons for the war.
Neither president nor top civilian and military advisers
were ever charged with having committed war crimes. The
mainstream American response to atrocity was to shift blame
for events like the My Lai massacre downward onto a lowly
second lieutenant while ignoring the larger operation of
which My Lai was a part: Operation Wheeler Wallawa, which
killed an estimated 10,000-11,000 Vietnamese civilians.{2}
Treating My Lai as an exception, and covering up countless
other atrocities against unarmed civilians -- from the murders
committed by Bob Kerrey's unit at Thang Phong to those committed
by the US Army's "Tiger Force" unit -- was part
of a larger pattern of justifying the Vietnam War to the
American people.{3}

At the end of Nixon's presidency no moral reckoning with
American war crimes occurred. The sole lesson from the My
Lai incident that political elites drew (and that the corporate
media echoed) was that "we are great and good"
for My Lai was the exception, not the rule. Perhaps that
conclusion was understandable given the public's immersion
in the propaganda of that time. Subsequent presidents and
their advisers did recognize that it was in their self-interest
to avoid a situation like the one that had humbled the U.S.
in Vietnam. But dominant political and military values never
altered. In dealing with weak states that refused to follow
Washington's orders, the Pentagon and the White House again
and again resorted to indiscriminate terror, coercion, and
intimidation to achieve their objectives. After a brief
interregnum, U.S. global military interventionism resumed
in response to the rise of Islamic nationalism in
Iran, civil war in Lebanon, and movements to overthrow U.S.
client regimes in Latin America.

Three decades later the failure to reform America's deeply
flawed political system, and the rise of the war-mongering
neo-cons, led to Bush's own "Vietnam" in Iraq.
And this time, in place of My Lai, Thang Phong, or Son Thang,
the U.S. marines are conducting a revenge massacre of civilians
in Fallujah, a city of some 300,000, thirty-five miles
west of Baghdad, on the edge of the Iraq desert.

Opinions about Fallujah and the April rebellion are still
forming, but the general outlines are clear, as is the context
in which the fighting arose. In late March, after six months
of relative quiet in the rebellious Sunni city of Fallujah,
U.S. marines, newly arrived in Iraq, took over from the
Army's 82nd Airborne Division, and tried to enter Fallujah
to assert their control. Their provocative actions set off
a cycle of revenge killings which, on March 31, led to the
ambush-murder and mutilation of four U.S. mercenaries by
a small band of unknown men.

Shortly afterwards, on March 25, 2004, proconsul Paul Bremer,
head of the isolated U.S. "Provisional Coalition Authority"
in Iraq, announced that the U.S. government intended to
retain its occupying army and permanent military bases in
Iraq no matter what any future Iraqi government might do
or request. Not since the Japanese imperial army established
"suzerainty" over "Manchukuo" in 1932,
and later ruled occupied China from behind the façade
of other puppet governments had an imperialist power resorted
to such a nakedly colonial formula. But Bremer communicated
precisely that to Iraqis: Outwardly the U.S. would proclaim
the existence of a new state of affairs; in practice it
would continue to exercise complete dominion over Iraq and
not allow it to control its armed forces, police, or foreign
policy, let alone rescind his earlier orders privatizing
the Iraqi economy. This legerdemain was to be displayed
for all the world to see on June 30, the day something called
"sovereignty," which the U.S. never legitimately
possessed, was "transferred" to some other U.S.-selected
entity.

Bremer then moved to eliminate an outspokenly anti-American
Iraqi leader: the young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, descendant
of a leading Shiite family that had provided both religious
and political leadership for modern Iraq from its earliest
days. His grandfather was Iraq's prime minister in 1932;
Ba'athists murdered his uncle, a venerated Ayatollah, in
1980 and his own father nineteen years later.{4} To arrest
Sadr and destroy his militia, the "Army of the Mahdi,"
became Bremer's objective. A small newspaper published by
Sadr's followers was closed; a Sadr deputy in Najaf arrested.
In reply, protestors took to the streets and Sadr called
on his supporters to conduct sit-ins against the occupation.
The largest demonstration occurred in East Baghdad, in an
impoverished district known as Sadr City. On April 3, the
U.S. military command escalated the crisis, ordering troops
to fire on the crowds and sending tanks into Baghdad's streets.{5}

Over the next few days small-scale fighting erupted across
Iraq between Iraqis and so called "Coalition"
troops, consisting mainly of soldiers sent by their governments,
against the wishes of overwhelming majorities of their people,
in return for deals cut with the Bush administration. Joining
with several other religious militias, the "Mahdi Army"
expelled Coalition police and soldiers from towns and cities
where resentment against the Americans was strongest.{6}
Because Sadr's and other religious militias represented
a social movement with broad popular support, they easily
gained control of six Shiite cities, including Karbala,
Kufa, and parts of nearby Najaf, with little loss of human
life. In this way, moving more quickly than Bremer, Sadr
and his militia ignited a nationwide rebellion which exposed
the political powerlessness of the occupation and brought
to an end the impunity of both the American military and
private mercenaries who comprise a growing proportion of
U.S. forces.

By April 4 American forces, their assorted Coalition partners,
and Iraqi collaborators were under assault throughout south,
central, and northern Iraq. Two days later, when marines
intent on avenging the earlier murder of the four Americans
made another foray into Fallujah's central residential neighborhoods,
they responded to stiff resistance by slaughtering unarmed
civilians, including women and children. Concurrently, in
Baghdad's Sadr City, Shiite militiamen supportive of al-Sadr,
took control of the city hall and police headquarters.{7}
An AP journalist, writing from the sacred pilgrimage city
of Najaf, quoted al-Sadr as declaring, "America
has shown its evil intentions, and the proud Iraqi people
cannot accept it . . . . They must defend their rights by
any means they see fit."{8} The Shiite and Sunni rebellions
had become linked.

At that point the stunned U.S. military deployed all the
force it could muster to shatter the Iraqis' will to resist.
Overstretched American combat soldiers, applying Israeli
street-fighting tactics against the Sunnis and Shiites,
retook many Shiite cities that the militias had controlled.
But they have been unable to regain control of East Baghdad,
and they have yet to capture or kill al-Sadr or destroyed
his militias, their stated objectives.{9}

As reports spread of the marine siege and "lockdown"
of an entire city, the heroism of the poorly armed Fallujah
resistance and the indiscriminate U.S. destruction of civilian
lives and property has kindled a fire of intense hatred
in the hearts of many Iraqis. Energized through their mosques,
Shiites and Sunnis, historic enemies, began to cooperate
in sending food assistance and joining the national resistance.
In the capital as in the provinces, U.S. troops fired on
pro-Sadr demonstrators. Adding to their numerous violations
of international law, they barged into hospitals and arrested
the wounded. To prevent banned weapons from being sent to
Fallujah along with food aid, they conducted punitive searches
of mosques, kicking in doors, spraying walls and ceilings
with gunfire, and in other ways desecrating them. In the
process they destroyed tons of foodstuff earmarked for the
encircled cities.

In besieged Fallujah, where the resistance fought the marines
to a standoff, the worst war crimes occurred. The U.S. military
dropped 500-ton, laser-guided bombs and body-shredding cluster
bombs, destroying mosques, schools, and whole residential
areas. "Predator" drones, helicopters, and AC-130
gunships rained death on all who ventured onto the streets.
When this level of "shock and awe" failed to quell
the uprising, the US military command declared a "truce,"
hoping to wait out the rebellion until the marines determined
the next appropriate level of destruction. While preparing
to launch a full-scale invasion of the city, marine artillery
continued firing on residential neighborhoods and teams
of marine snipers -- their motto "one bullet, one kill"
-- made forays into Fallujah in order "to clear the
streets and undermine the insurgents."{10}

Firing from bridges and the rooftops of factories and apartments,
using explosive dum-dum bullets, the marines shot up ambulances
and killed women together with their infants, young children,
and old men -- some as they tried to flee the fighting.
One refugee, interviewed in Baghdad by independent journalist
Dahr Jamail, recalled that "There were so many snipers,
anyone leaving their house was killed."{11} Los Angeles
Times journalist Tony Perry cited a proud corporal who said,
"sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream
a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies, then I'll use
a second shot."{12}

In Iraq private mercenaries, employed by "privatized
military firms," roam the war zones in civilian clothes
and indigenous garb, selling their fighting and logistical
services for cash. Also unlike Nanjing, no disbanded army
is present in Fallujah, only resistance fighters, comprised
of "Shias, Ba'athists, Sufis, tribes, and Arab fighters."{13}
They represent mainly the youth of the community, buoyed
by its sympathy. But judging from statements issued by senior
American commanders and their spokesmen, the same self-righteous,
narrow-minded thinking that characterized Japanese officers
in wartime China during and after the Nanjing massacre,
prevails today among U.S. officers, from Gen. John Abizaid
at Central Command to frontline generals Ricardo Sanchez
and spokesman Mark Kimmett. And just as the Japanese press
served the needs of the state by failing to report the truth
of the Nanjing massacre, so American corporate media perform
a similar function by not reporting the full extent of the
U.S. military's killing and general mistreatment of unarmed
civilians throughout Iraq,

After three weeks of rebellion the casualty figures from
Fallujah alone ranged from a low of 600 to 650 combatant
and non-combatants killed and over 1,200 injured -- readily
admitted to even by the U.S. command -- to estimates ranging
upward from one thousand.{14} The overwhelming majority
may be women, children, and old people but who knows their
real numbers? The U.S. occupiers are attacking on many fronts
with artillery, planes, and tanks, but most Iraqis still
wait to see how far the Americans around Fallujah and Najaf
will push their collective punishments. In the U.S. military
command some believe that if they are to reassert control
in western and central Iraq, they must retake symbolically
important Sunni Fallujah, and destroy al-Sadr and his militia
in the Shiite "Shrine cities" of Kerbala, Kufa,
Najaf, and Nasiriya.{15} The occupation army's drive to
crush the resistance has rendered concern for civilian casualties
largely irrelevant.

At this writing Fallujah has been elevated to the level
of a presidential targeting decision. Whether Bush will
choose to destroy the Fallujah resistance, which he mistakenly
denigrates as "a bunch of thugs and killers,"
or allow his field commanders to heed the advice of Iraqi
collaborators and negotiate a solution with them remains
unclear.{16} If his generals tell him that an offensive
is feasible, and his close advisers warn that he must escalate
the violence in order to "stabilize" Iraq, he
will probably give the order. Despite any temporary truce,
the eventual outcome will be determined by policy issues
having to do with Fallujah's influence on the larger U.S.
position in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, and not
by worry over committing more acts in violation of international
law. Having lost the trust of the current generation of
Iraqis by the brutal manner in which it has mismanaged a
full year of occupation, the U.S. military may be unable
to sustain its presence in Iraq no matter what tactical
victories it achieves or changes of strategy it adopts.

The people of Fallujah have paid dearly, but the events
in that city have redefined the conflict in ways that highlight
the complete political bankruptcy of the U.S. occupation
and point to the likelihood of U.S. failure to gain military
and economic control of oil-rich Iraq. As in Nanjing and
My Lai in earlier wars, the April battles for control of
Fallujah, East Baghdad, Najaf, and other Shiite Shrine cities,
and the large numbers of dead and wounded particularly on
the Iraqi side, have clearly signaled to the world that
Iraq is again at war. Above all, these needless battles
have shed light on the criminality of the U.S. conquest
and occupation, and in the process raised important questions
about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

II

More discussion is needed to clarify the connections between
the Nanjing massacre and the global issues of war and military
occupation that I raised in my earlier review of Nanking
1937. As the large, growing literature on the Nanjing massacre
makes clear, important questions remain unresolved. But
we also need to use the study of war crimes to reflect on
what Edward Herman calls the "global structure of interest
and power" that determines which massacres become widely
known and acted upon, and which are forgotten or glossed
over. Where the Middle East is concerned, one way to advance
such reflection is to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and the problem of Israeli violations of international law.
Are there fruitful comparisons to be drawn to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict?

In studying why aggressors commit war crimes, I argued the
importance of broad comparative studies of both historical
and contemporary events. Shifting from a bi-national to
a cross-national or global, comparative framework, allows
us to perceive the universal within the particular in each
major case of war criminality. It is also a way to address
the vital moral and social problems of the present. A comparative
approach, however, requires that the historian discard double
standards rooted in myths of national exceptionalism, and
apply to one's own government and its allies the very same
principles that Americans and their allies, as victors,
once applied in assessing the crimes of Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan.

From such a perspective "the logic of Japan's atrocities"
in 1930s China may be compared with many contemporary instances
of aggression and war crimes, including the official "policies
that Israeli governments (past but especially present) pursue
against the Palestinians." These policies long antedate
the second intifada. They include torturing detainees, assassinating
political and spiritual leaders, taking Palestinian land
directly by annexation or indirectly by building security
roads around illegal Israeli settlements, and redrawing
the boundaries of Israel by constructing high cement barriers
and electronic fences (called "terrorism prevention
fences"). Such "walls" turn Palestinian territory
into Bantustan-like enclaves where individuals live in dire
poverty, without hope of ever having a bounded, contiguous
territorial state of their own.{17}

These statements of fact are amply corroborated, daily,
by official Israeli policy statements and reliable press
accounts of Israeli conduct. For thirty-seven years Israeli
government's have committed countless criminal acts against
the Palestinian people, in violation of the canons of international
humanitarian law, including Article 6 of the 1945 "Nuremberg
Charter" and the 1949 Geneva Conventions pertaining
to the protection of people under occupation.

The U.S. government has been a co-actor in Israel's warfare,
an accomplice to its murders of Palestinian civilians, and
a defender of its iron-fisted occupation. Washington provides
the weapons, financial aid, and diplomatic protection for
Israel's repeated violations of traditional international
law. On twenty-eight occasions since 1970, Democratic and
Republican administrations, strongly backed by Congress,
have vetoed UN Security Council resolutions criticizing
Israel's illegal human rights violations.{18} The U.S. also
turns a sympathetic eye to Israel's nuclear weapon's program
while selectively criticizing nuclear proliferation in so-called
"axis of evil" countries, North Korea and Iran.
President Bush has even formally endorsed Prime Minister
Sharon's plan for retaining substantial, illegal Jewish
settlements on the West Bank, something that previous administrations
had long described as "obstacles to peace."

To be sure, every human rights abuse and every atrocity
event has a different significance; the historical contexts
in which they occur are distinctive; and issues of causation,
even within a single individual, are extremely complex.
Yet it is also true that among Israeli soldiers facing legitimate
Palestinian resistance in the refugee-camps of the occupied
territories, are many of the very same factors that once
led Japanese invaders to commit mass atrocities at Nanjing
and elsewhere in China, and U.S. forces to do the same with
impunity in Vietnam, and again today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Virulent racism, which causes the occupier to denigrate
the native people, treat them as sub-human, and demean their
national culture seems to be a constant in situations that
produce war crimes. Racism heightens the foreign invaders'
level of frustration, hatred and rage while he struggles
to determine who the enemy is, and to destroy all forms
of resistance. The physical and emotional exhaustion of
occupiers confronting indigenous resistance increases their
likelihood of committing atrocities. So too does low troop
morale caused in part by assignments that require them to
trample on the rights of the subjugated people in a colonial
war of repression.

In the background to acts of overt aggression and war criminality
one often finds political leaders with an extreme "Machiavellian
mind-set," who "proclaim the absolute primacy
of state interests" and pursue aggressive unilateralism.{19}
Much like war criminals of the twentieth century, most of
them are secularists. They pursue strategies that bring
"short-term benefits" to their most important
constituents and act "rationally" within their
own "doctrinal framework," which is anything but
rational.{20} That they have a personal interest in
never being held accountable to any higher authority goes
without saying.

A second conditioning factor is policy makers who, like
Bush and Rumsfeld, deny to an occupied population, or to
prisoners-of-war, treatment in accordance with international
law, or who directly order or sanction military strategies
of indiscriminate violence against all who resist their
aims, thus opening the way to the commission of atrocities
as part of routine operations. This occurred in Vietnam;
it has happened again in occupied Iraq where the level of
fighting is less intense.

Harder to weigh in the political background of massacres
are the dominant beliefs and commitments of persons in the
top ranks of leadership: what are their beliefs, and how
does their example influence subordinates lower down in
the chain of command?

Particularly difficult to assess is the concept of religious
mission, used by the leaders of many aggressor states. In
wartime Japan belief in spreading a national creed, even
if it meant depriving the Chinese and other Asian peoples
of their lives and liberties, helped to generate public
support for the China War. In Israel under Ariel Sharon's
Likud rule religion is also deployed for instrumentalist
purposes. Sharon's strongest supporters, however, are mostly
secularists, and the policies he follows are similar to
those of his Labor Party predecessors. In the U.S., surely
one of the most religiously obsessed countries in the world,
the creed of the Chosen People who have God on their side
underpins and encourages violence. Bush's speeches, larded
with references to God, reflect his understanding of that
fact. But neither religion nor religiosity lie at the root
of the zealotry of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and their
minions. Rather, theology is the red meat that the extreme
realists of the Bush administration throw to their Protestant
evangelical and fundamentalist constituents in the Republican
Party, hoping it will ensure their support.{21}

By pursuing these and other comparisons, historians may
be able to isolate in each situation the most relevant causal
factors that give rise to mass murders and crimes against
humanity.{22}

For the past three years researchers in Japan and Europe
have been gathering and sifting evidence of possible American
war crimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Their ultimate
aim has been to bring before an international tribunal,
in absentia, President George W. Bush, the leader who bears
the highest responsibility for crimes committed in pursuit
of his policies. At public hearings held in Japan on sixteen
different occasions between December 2002 and November 2003,
Japanese field researchers presented their findings, which
were later published in seven volumes.{23} Human Rights
Watch has also reported on how American troops in Afghanistan
"are operating outside the rule of law, using excessive
force to make arrests, mistreating detainees and holding
them indefinitely."{24} Amnesty International and Occupation
Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and other NGOs, UN officials,
independent journalists and researchers are all documenting
the criminal acts that American forces in Afghanistan and
Iraq are repeatedly committing against civilians and prisoners
of war.

One of the most notorious war crimes occurred in Dasht-e Leili,
Afghanistan. On November 26, 2001, thousands of Taliban
troops surrendered at Kunduz after negotiations with the
Northern Alliance warlord, General Dostum. Allegedly in
the presence of members of the 595 A-team from the U.S.
Fifth Special Forces, which worked with the notorious Dostum
at the surrender negotiations, as well as U.S. Army personnel
and CIA agents, the prisoners were stuffed into truck containers,
"up to 300 people in each," and then transported
over a ten-day period to a prison near the Dasht-e Leili
desert. En route most of them "slowly strangled to
death from . . . lack of oxygen." Their bodies were
dumped in an "acre-large, densely packed" grave
site. Estimates of the number of prisoners of war who died
in the containers vary widely: some give a low of about
1,000 people; one documentary film maker estimated over
3,000, others say as many as 5,000.{25}

Four facts stand out: (1) the deaths of the surrendered
prisoners "by [slow] asphyxiation in transport containers"
was a major war crime under international law; (2) the American
state had some form of control over the militarily weak
Northern Alliance, and American officers as well as CIA
agents worked with the Northern Alliance troops and "at
various points seemed in overall command;" (3) nevertheless,
both the U.S. government and its men in the field appear
to have acquiesced in the killing; (4) "[Physicians
for Human Rights] and Amnesty International representatives
urged that the site be protected for further examination
and that an investigation be carried out . . . . But nothing
happened." As Edward Herman explains, "The neglect
of Dasht-e Leili . . . follows from . . . U.S. (and British)
support of the killers and partial direct as well as command
responsibility for the killings. The United States refuses
to allow its personnel to be dealt with by international
bodies on matters of possible criminal behavior, and as
standard practice it denies or plays down any criminal incidents
or massacres carried out by its personnel or by its clients."{26}

Dasht-e Leili is but one example of the American double
standard on war atrocities. Independent researchers and
journalists are also scrutinizing the system of secret American
concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere
around the world where "detainees" captured in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, and other countries are held
without charge, in isolation, many subjected to beatings
and other forms of torture. Overall estimates of such prisoners,
including very young boys, women, and old men, range from
14,000 to over 20,000. Most of them are being held in Iraq,
without charges, in open-air concentration camps on U.S.
military bases, or in solitary confinement in Hussein's
old prisons.{27} They are denied family visits and subjected
to various forms of ill treatment and torture-- all in blatant
violation of international law.

Because U.S.-occupied Iraq is for American and Coalition
soldiers an "atrocity-producing situation" in
much the same way as occupied China was for the Japanese,
and Vietnam for an earlier generation of Americans, the
practice of torturing prisoners is widespread, often encouraged
by military intelligence specialists.

Unique to the Iraq situation, however, is the Pentagon's
heavy reliance on privatized military industry to conduct
tactical operations, gather intelligence, and interrogate
prisoners. {28}Recent evidence of how American intelligence
officers and civilian mercenaries, working for Virginia-based
CACI International and the Titan Corporation of San Diego,
interacted in running the notorious Abu Ghraib prison complex
bears this out. Mercenaries participated (directly and indirectly),
along with CIA agents, intelligence officers, and army guards
in the torture, beating to death, and sexual humiliation
of Iraqi male and female detainees, most of whom were civilians,
"picked up in random military sweeps and at highway
checkpoints."{29}

At the end of April graphic photographs and videos of their
crimes, taken by American M.P.s at the prison, began to
appear in many newspapers in the West and throughout the
Arab world. The irony of morally depraved American soldiers
"supposedly bringing freedom and democracy and the
American way of life" to the Middle East became clear
for all to see.{30} Not only did the images fully support
allegations of widespread torture and humiliation of Iraqis,
they also brought from the shadows the mercenary issue,
revealing a Pentagon-created legal void beyond the reach
of the Uniform Code of Military Justice or any international
law. Ultimate responsibility for systemic criminal abuses
in the U.S. global prison system rests with the two top
civilians in the military chain of command: Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld and Commander-in-Chief Bush. How useful
will law be in clarifying their personal accountability
for the war and the ensuing military criminality occurring
on a massive scale?

In short, historians wishing to gain a deeper understanding
of the Nanjing massacre or any other large-scale atrocity
event from the past would be well advised to study historical
and contemporary materials, especially if they wish to contribute
to combating war crimes in the present.

They might also ponder Judge Radhabinad Pal's final judgment
at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal. The most politically independent
of the eleven Tokyo judges, his enduring contribution was
to have condemned "Western" imperialism, racism,
and double standards, while pointing to the state terrorist
methods of warfare that lay in the future. The U.S. had
set a new standard of killing the innocent in 1945 by its
strategic bombing of Japanese cities, and, above all, by
its decision to use the atomic bomb. Pal, sounding an alarm,
called it "the only near approach to the directives
of the . . . Nazi leaders during the [S]econd World War."{31}
His use of historical analogy in a courtroom setting cut
to the point, illuminating one of the twentieth-century's
worst crimes.

Today, in a time of perpetual American global wars and colossal
American policy failures, it is incumbent on historians
to condemn governments that turn their soldiers into terrorists,
and work politically to punish arch war criminals.

12. Tony Perry, "For Marine Snipers, War Is Close Up
and Personal," Los Angeles Times (April 19. 2004).

13. Dahr Jamail, "Interview with a Mujahedeen, Observations
from a Political Scientist," Iraq Dispatches, posted
from Baghdad April 27, 2004. Available at http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/archives/000270.html

14. Information on the rebellion comes from the following
sources: "How GI Bullies Are Making Enemies of their
Iraqi Friends," available at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/11/1081621841048.html
"Losing Falluja", The Guardian (April 15, 2004);
Hamza Hendawi, "U.S. Drive to Deal with Insurgents,
Shiite uprising taking political toll on U.S. Iraq Policies,"
AP (April 11, 2004); Karl Vick and Anthony Shadid, "Fallujah
Gains Mythic Air: Siege Redefines Conflict for Iraqis in
Capital," Washington Post Foreign Service, April 13,
2004, p. AO1; Rahul Mahajan, "Report from Fallujah
-- Destroying a Town in Order to Save It," Empire Notes
-- a Blog (April 25, 2004); the superb writing of Professor
Juan Cole, [http://juancole.com], the weblog blog of Dahar
Jamail of The New Standard, and ISN Security Watch,
April 19, available at http://www.isn.ethz.ch.

15. Tony Perry, "Marines Warn of Battle in Fallouja;
U.S. Officials Say Time Is Running Out on the Tenuous Cease
Fire," Los Angeles Times (April 23, 2004).

16. David Sanger and Thom Shanker, "Bush's Decision
on Possible Attack on Falluja Seems Near," New York
Times (April 25, 2004).

18. Stephen Zunes, "Defense of Israeli Assassination
Policy by the Bush Administration and Democratic Leaders
an Affront to International Law and Israeli Security,"
Foreign Policy in Focus (April 2, 2004), available at www.fpif.org

25. The material in this and the next paragraph is based
on Edward Herman, "Dasht-E Leili," ZNET Commentary,
April 7, 2004; Jennifer Lane, "The Mass Graves at Dasht-e
Leili: Assessing U.S. Liability for Human Rights Violations
During the War in Afghanistan," California Western
International Law Journal, Vol. 34/145 (Fall 2003); and
John Quigley, "The Afghanistan War and Self-Defense,"
Valparaiso University Law Review 37/541 (Spring 2003), n.
102.

26. Edward Herman, "Dasht-E Leili," ZNET Commentary,
April 7, 2004.

27. Jeffrey Gettleman, "As U.S. Detains Iraqis, Families
Plead for News," New York Times (March 7, 2004). Citing
a U.S. military data base he notes that ""More
than 10,000 men and boys are in custody." Today that
figure is probably far higher. Also see Daniel McGrory,
"Concentration Camps in Baghdad: Families Live in Fear
of Midnight Call by US Patrols," The Times Online,
July 9, 2003, available at http://globalsearch.ca/articles/MCG307A.html

More Comments:

Roger Brown -
5/22/2004

Gentlemen,

Regarding Nanjing, I would recommend following the Japan Focus link and reading, first, the critique of Herbert Bix's article posted by Joshua Fogel and, second, the historiographical information supplied by David Askew.

Roger Brown

Bill Heuisler -
5/19/2004

Mr. Moise,
Concerned about accurate information? To be accurate, the North Vietnamese "Land Reform" was really mass murder in the name of Maoist Communism. Forced exodus of thousands of Catholics, massive importation of rice and slaughter of thousands of North Vietnamese was not land reform.

Now I understand your anxiety to ignore lies, inaccurate footnoting and misstatements by Bix. You must defend him because you apparently agree with his anti-US premise.
North Vietnam after '54 was an ugly abattoir applauded only by the likes of FitzGerald, Chomsky and Sontag.

Edwin Moise -
5/19/2004

As regards my correcting you on minor details, such as the identities of the units against which Operation Wheeler/Wallowa was directed, I have two comments.

First, there are people who read this forum, and I would prefer that they not see inaccurate information here and be misled by it.

Second, if you think the details are such irrelevant trivia that it does not much matter whether you stated them accurately, why did you put them in your post?

You suggest the fact that Chomsky "footnotes NVA sources like General Giap" is a reason for not taking him seriously as a scholar. Yes, he cites General Giap. So do I. There is useful information to be found in Giap's writings. As a matter of fact, I can think of one topic about which both Chomsky and I have written--the land reform of the 1950s in North Vietnam--on which failure to cite Giap (either directly or by citing secondary works that cite Giap) would have been a grotesque omission.

As regards the Nanjing Massacre, I must first apologize for gross carelessness in my first reply to you. You wrote that there had been a "half million civilian deaths" in this incident. I had intended to include the word "civilian" in my reply to you, and thought I had done so, but when I went back and looked, I found I had somehow omitted it. A lot of the people killed in the Nanjing Massacre were not civilians; they were Chinese soldiers, who were taken prisoner by the Japanese and then massacred.

I am far from being an expert on the Nanjing Massacre. My impression is that the death toll of 200,000 estimated at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal in the late 1940s is surely too low, and that the estimate of 300,000, produced by the Nanjing war crimes tribunal at about the same time, which long remained the standard, generally accepted estimate in China, should probably be taken as an upper bound. If the total number of deaths was 300,000, then the number of civilian deaths would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000.

I am in a poor position to criticize you for neglecting the difference between civilian deaths and total deaths, but leaving that aside, I am startled by your use of the published estimates ranging from 300,000 to 370,000 as justification for your own statment that there had been 500,000.

Edwin Moise

Jonathan Dresner -
5/19/2004

Mr. Heuisler,

I'll have to hunt around for reviews of the Yin and Young. My brief cyberhunt suggests that they are the source of Chang's numbers. I do note, without prejudice, that Yu Ying-shih is a medievalist.

Bill Heuisler -
5/19/2004

Dr. Dresner,
My numbers are based on a book called The Rape Of Nanking by James Yin and Shi Young. "Between December 1937 and March 1938 at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners-of-war were killed in and around Nanking." Here's a write-up:
NEW DATA PROVIDES CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE
NEARLY 370,000 CHINESE WERE MURDERED IN NANKING MASSACRE
The Rape of Nanking is an innovative and credible work on modern Chinese history, according to Princeton University history professor Ying-shih Yü, who adds, "It is a solid and original study that maintains all the important standards of modern historiography."

The work draws its main narrative from credible research techniques, including archives in Germany and Japan, records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and the recollections of survivors of the Nanking massacre. While the total number of people killed in Nanking and its vicinity during the Nanking Massacre has been the subject of controversy, the evidence presented in The Rape of Nanking should put an end to this debate.

For the second edition of the book, published on December 13, 1997 -- the 60th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking -- the authors carefully reviewed the records of Japanese military units, the puppet municipal government of Nanking established under Japanese occupation, and Chinese and international burial societies. These records conclusively demonstrate that no fewer than 369,366 bodies of Chinese men, women, and children were buried or otherwise "disposed of" by these agencies. The records leave open the possibility that there were in fact many more victims, but the authors eliminated from their tally any reports that might conceivably have been overlapping or unreliable.

My objection is Bix's absurd hypothesis and his padding the writings of footnoted writers/reporters (10 & 11).
No Marine sniper ever fired a dum-dum, deliberately shot a civilian or shot at an ambulance. These lies damage our country's reputation and the reputation of the Corps.
Some people grow vicarious hair on their chest by lying about their betters.
Bill Heuisler

Jonathan Dresner -
5/19/2004

Mr. Heuisler,

While I agree that the equations Bix is making are stretched to the point of irrelevancy, I have to disagree that attempting to posit reasonably accurate numbers for the Nanjing atrocities is not quibbling nor does it diminish the horror of those atrocities. At some point, I think there are diminishing historical returns from such investigations, but I'm not sure we've reached that point yet.

The highest figure I've seen cited seriously is 340,000; the 300,000 is the "official" Chinese Communist government total (and given how little credence you'd give anything else they told you, I'm curious as to why you give this figure any more). Japanese nationalists trying to minimize the event have posited numbers in the low tens of thousands, but that's not much more credible, based on the sources available, than the 340,000 figure. Both extremes rely on weak over-interpretations of weak data.

The figures released closest to the actual event tended to be around 200,000, and what I know of the documents and evidence suggests to me that the actual number is probably around there, but that we will never know for sure unless some truly radical new method of historical interpretation comes to light.

If you're wondering about sources, I mostly use Joshua Fogel's edited volume, "The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography" and Ienaga's "The Fifteen Years War". I've read a little of Iris Chang and a little of Tanaka Masaaki, neither of whom impressed me positively.

Bill Heuisler -
5/18/2004

Mr. Moise,
Is it pettifoggery or misdirection to ignore my arguments and concentrate on minor points? NVA Army or "Division"? Viet Cong? What's your point? They were soldiers. They were not civilians as Mr. Bix asserted. Chomsky's sources may be something you care to debate, but the point is he has very little praise for the country that has given him wealth and security and he footnotes NVA sources like General Giap. So, using Chomsky for footnotes, quotes or judicious opinions on anything American is as useful as quoting Hitler's Mein Kampf for commentary on Zionism.

Half a million an overestimation by a factor of two?
Cite one source, Mr. Moise, for 250,000. Most published estimates of Nanking deaths vary from 300,000 to 370,000, but no one can be sure and some Chinese scholars say they cannot quantify the deaths because there was no accurate census within a decade and refugees had filled the city before Chiang Kai Chek abandoned Nanking to the Japanese. Also, there was no way to count the deaths because so many were thrown into the Yangtse, burned in huge piles and buried in mass graves. Why would you belittle such a gross atrocity? Is Mr. Bix's premise of American perfidy so important to some readers (to you?) that you'd reject plausible estimates to such a ridiculous degree?

For instance: Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported the early stages of the massacre before being forced to leave. He later wrote: "I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there. The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch ... was of a group of smoking chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops. They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them." As he departed, he said he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators. He concluded that the rape of Nanking was "one of the great atrocities of modern times." 500,000 deaths may badly underestimate and quibbling without sources wastes time.

To compare Nanking to anything American soldiers did in Vietnam is grotesque farce. Quoting Chomsky to historians is an insult and nit picking over Army vs Division when both are obviously not civilians (the point) is silly.
Bill Heuisler

Edwin Moise -
5/18/2004

Mr. Heuisler's estimate of half a million deaths in the Nanjing Massacre is an overestimate, probably by a factor of two or a bit more. What actually happened at Nanjing was ghastly enough to make such exaggeration quite gratuitous.

As I have already pointed out in my reply to Dr. Bix, Chomsky had *not* said that Operation Wheeler/Wallowa had killed an estimated 10,000-11,000 civilians. I might add that there was no such thing as the 2nd NVA Army at the time of Operation Wheeler/Wallowa. The operation was directed against units of the 2nd NVA Division and of the Viet Cong.

Mr. Heuisler's statement that Chomsky "admits his book-information on Vietnam comes from the NVA and the Communist government" is not very clearly phrased. If he will explain exactly what he meant, I will probably wish to disagree with it. Chomsky's writings on the Vietnam War, including the particular piece under discussion here, have been based much more on American sources than on anything coming from Hanoi.

Edwin Moise

Bill Heuisler -
5/18/2004

Mr. Bix,
Your comparison is disgusting, the majority of your sources anti-American and highly inaccurate. Worse, when you cite Leftist references, you lie about them.

To point out the difference between the Rape of Nanking and anything the US has done is superfluous. Suffice to say, the half million civilian deaths during a period of a few weeks in Nanking was deliberate Japanese policy and your US comparisons were not. Nanking atrocities were fully documented by Chinese survivors and post-war discovery of photos taken by Japanese soldiers. But your US comparisons were made through Courts Martial records where the US policed itself. Your inability to see the difference is pathetic.

Chomsky's Operation Wheeler Wallawa, which he says killed an estimated 10,000-11,000 Vietnamese civilians wildly misstates a very successful military (air and ground) operation against the 2nd NVA Army that killed thousands of NVA soldiers. Civilians killed in this operation - if any - were collateral to the military operation, not central to US policy. Using Chomsky as a source is an insult to HNN readers. He admits his book-information on Vietnam comes from the NVA and the Communist government.

This article isn't worth my time, but you tried to drag Marine snipers through your anti-american slime by referencing two different sources (10 & 11) and saying Marines fired dum-dum explosive rounds, and that Marine snipers fired at civilians and ambulances. Not only are these lies ridiculous, but a careful read shows your source materials don't mention dum-dums, civilian targets or ambulances being targeted by Marines. You lied about our fighting men to add nasty spice, didn't you?

Mr. Bix you aren't fit to type the word, Marine.
Bill Heuisler

Edwin Moise -
5/17/2004

I cannot agree with Dr. Bix's statement that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon escalated U.S. military action in Vietnam "to genocidal levels." They killed a lot of Vietnamese, but not that many.

This may simply reflect differences in the ways Dr. Bix and I use the term "genocidal," which is often applied rather loosely. But it may reflect differences over the actual level of American killing in Vietnam. I note one very questionable passage in which Dr. Bix writes that Operation Wheeler Wallawa "killed an estimated 10,000-11,000 Vietnamese civilians." The source he cites for this, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), p. 317, actually says that in Operation Wheeler Wallawa, "over 10,000 enemy were reported killed." Chomsky and Herman indicated that many of these were civilians, but they did not state or imply that all, or even most, were civilians.